I intent to analyse playlists on Spotify which are named either
‘calming’ or ‘relaxing’ or ‘relaxation’ and group them twofold or
threefold: 1 group general and 1 group aimed at dogs. Possibly also a
third group for dogs where scientific research (into which exactc music
elements are relevant for calming dogs) may have been been applied. The
corpus can be made from songs on many playlists that exist for those
groups. It is my working hypothesis that the first two groups are hardly
different and that a high level of antropomorphism is applicable =>
what humans define and perceive as relaxing will be true for dogs also.
Potentially a third group, well defined on scientific research, may show
significant differences on a variety of elements. It might also be that
‘true’ calming music for dogs is based on elements that disqualify for
humans as true music (i.e. pitches in sounds at frequency levels
unhearable for humans but hearable for dogs.
** Research has been done into calming/relaxing effects of music,
both for humans as for dogs. For the first group, humans, we know much
more given a higher quality level of feedback. For dogs, research shows
that similar aspects apply as for humans (tempo, loudness, pitch,
instruments) but also differences (variety, genre, ’nature’sounds). At
this stage I haven’t identified nor selected specific tracks for each of
these 2 or 3 groups. I need to do more analysis of previous research
into calming music for dogs to identify the musical elements that appear
to be relevant.